The Rise and Fall of the Individual

On this day:

1497
Vasco da Gama rounds the Cape of Good Hope, the point where Bartolomeu Dias had previously turned back to Portugal.
1598
Seven Year War: Battle of Noryang Point – The final battle of the Seven Year War is fought between the China and the Korean Allied Forces and Japanese navies, resulting in a decisive Allied Forces victory.
1653
English Interregnum: The Protectorate – Oliver Cromwell becomes Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland.
1689
Convention Parliament: The Declaration of Right is embodied in the Bill of Rights.
1773
American Revolution: Boston Tea Party – Members of the Sons of Liberty disguised as Mohawks dump crates of tea into Boston harbor as a protest against the Tea Act.
1920
The Haiyuan earthquake, magnitude 8.5, rocks the Gansu province in China, killing an estimated 200,000.
1944
World War II: The Battle of the Bulge begins with the surprise offensive of three German armies through the Ardennes forest.
1950
U.S. President Harry S. Truman declares a state of emergency, after Chinese troops enter the fight with communist North Korea in the Korean War.
1986
Revolt in Kazakhstan against Communist Party of Kazakhstan, known as Zheltoksan, which becomes the first sign of ethnic strife during Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s tenure
1997
An episode of Pokémon, “Dennō Senshi Porygon”, aired in Japan induces seizures in 685 Japanese children.

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Europe, in the year 2025, is what NPR would look like if it ran a continent.
It is time for a rant about Europe. It has, in fact, been time for quite a while, but there is always a moment at which the straw meets the camel, and, for me, that moment came when the European Union announced that it intended to extort another hundred million dollars or so out of the wildly productive American tech sector, and then the bureaucrats and politicos who staff that dreadful institution took to the very service they were in the midst of extorting to offer up generalized attacks on the United States. --Cooke from NR

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In almost every sector of the economy, educational requirements are becoming less strenuous, according to Indeed, a jobs website. America’s professional and business services industry employs more people without a university education than it did 15 years ago, even though there are fewer such people around.

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Top universities are financial titans, generating investment profits that mirror those of Wall Street firms. They are health care companies; the University of Pennsylvania gets half its revenue from the hospitals it runs. They commercialize the inventions that spring from their labs. They sell four-year subscriptions for rent and classes to their students and lifelong memberships in an elite club to their donors (posthumous, if the checks are big enough).

By revenue, UPenn is bigger than BNY Mellon; Columbia is as big as Coinbase. But these universities operate on profit margins thinner than those of a grocery store. In short, they make a lot of money but spend almost all of it.

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The Rise and Fall of the Individual

Sometimes the 'larger picture' can be very small.

One murder after another forced its way onto the news cycle this weekend, each displacing another murder story. Bondi Beach. Brown University. Reiner. Two had skin-crawling Old Testament elements of father and son, Abraham and Isaac. Can you imagine recruiting your father or son for the suicidal murder of strangers?

The Bondi murders have a particular modern odor: the growing importance and insignificance of the individual. It is said to be 'terrorism', violence with a political motive geared to influence political decisions. Some certainly do. Some cause inconvenience, then repression, torture, and death, as anti-German terrorists did in the Second World War. But the impact of terrorism, where a single individual or a small group creates disproportionate harm to strangers and non-combatants, its so-called 'asymmetry', is simply a rogue act by a rogue animal. Its damage hits weak, powerless individuals with little or no influence over the political or social flow of things. It apparently hopes to influence change by awakening the better instincts of its enemy.

Yet they are mere spasms of simple human bloodlust.

As time passes, the 'asymmetric' power of the individual will increase, resulting in greater and more meaningless asymmetric victimhood among an increasing number of bewildered victims.

News flash: four terrorists have been arrested in California, building bombs in their war against capitalism, but were unsure where to send them.

Here War Is Simple

Here war is simple like a monument:
A telephone is speaking to a man;
Flags on a map assert that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan
For living men in terror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,
And can be lost and are, and miss their wives,
And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.

But ideas can be true although men die,
And we can watch a thousand faces
Made active by one lie:
And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking. Dachau.

---W. H. Auden